“There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all.”
So said 26th President, and current Mount Rushmore resident, Theodore Roosevelt. Decades later, Protestant Vice President George H.W. Bush said no atheist can be considered a citizen nor patriot. But atheists aren’t the ones with torn allegiance; Christians, like Bush, aren’t American at all. “Christian patriot” is an oxymoron.
A prerequisite to patriotism must include the belief that the U.S. Constitution shall be roundly respected as the highest and primary ruling principle of American law. Bar none. When one is sworn in for any legal position or purpose, any oath should be taken on the United States Constitution, and certainly not using any of the myriad versions of the Holy Bible. A tome that was pieced together over hundreds of years in a handful of languages (none of which was English), thousands of miles away from what would, centuries later, become America.
Faux U.S. citizen Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-Miss.) actually distributed copies of the King James Version of that Bible to his 534 colleagues in the House and Senate (the Bible-thumping and presumable Constitution basher even included a note: “I find that the best advice comes through meditating on God’s word”; I am not making this up)
Whether Christians care to admit it, there is very strong evidence that the Constitution was not written by Jesus nor any other Bronze Age Middle-Eastern deity. In fact, the document’s actual primary author, James Madison, strongly advocated for the complete separation of church and state. What’s more, the “Supremacy Clause” found in Article Six makes it plain that the Constitution, rather than any other document, is paramount in the United States of America.
But a “good” Christian will turn to the Bible before anything else to inform their worldview and policy making, which is why I say: if the United States Constitution takes a back seat to your preferred holy book, you should not and cannot claim to be an American patriot. A “fan”? Sure. You can, say, join everybody else and pretend to care about soccer every fourth summer and root for us in the World Cup, but that does not make you American.
I go back and forth on the subject of Christian suffrage. I do not want anybody who thinks like a Christian to vote, and there is a certain logic that half-hearted “Americans” who put the country in the backseat should not be permitted to take part in our democracy. But, maybe our Constitution still applies to secondary citizens, even if Christians think it’s no better than our number two reference.
Of course, Christians like Sarah Palin (single-handedly generating a cottage industry for American fact-checkers) relegate their country to the No. 3 slot. Palin once ordered her family’s priorities like this: “When we serve, we devote ourselves to God, family and country.”
By the numbers, at least, Palin’s Christianity clearly seeped farther into American consciousness than any other religion. But I would be remiss to imply that only Christians render themselves irrelevant to the national conversation with their fractured loyalties. Of course, this also goes for every Jew, Muslim and any other person who chooses to put any magical deity, from A(llah) to Z(eus), in a position privileged over the United States. They all exercise their free will and volunteer for second-class citizenship.
Avowed anti-science Christian Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.) makes no effort to hide his own allegiance, freely admitting his determination to vote only for American laws if he believes they conform with his “Judeo-Christian Principles.” Earlier in 2014 Congressman Broun campaigned for a seat in the U.S. Senate before the traitor lost the Georgia Republican primary, where he earned less than 10 percent of the vote to finish a distant fifth place.
It is not patriotism when you rule your life and country with any brand of Christian dogma that includes supreme belief in your preferred supreme being that you place on a supreme pedestal. Heck, it has been posited that a real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works. Perhaps that definition, at least when compared to contemporary Christian sharia, is an interpretation we can all embrace. And another reason to reject the Christian pseudo-patriots can be found in this pithy anticipation: “When Fascism Comes to America, It Will Be Cloaked In Patriotism and Carrying the Cross.”